[WSIS CS-Plenary] The Economist on the 'realdigitaldivide'

[Soenke Zehle]

Sasha,

what's perhaps most insidious about the 
let-a-thousand-mobile-networks-bloom intervention of the Economist is 
not the predictable praise for 'the markets' miraculous ability to 
achive allocative optima in the field of ICT, but its deliberate 
combination with an attack on the kind of multilateralization of access 
issues the DSF and similar initiatives (might)imply.

So yes, support for a public goods/commons perspective that reiterates 
that it is corporations, not users, that have long benefitted from the 
enclosure of an originally public info-domain, and that setting aside 
spectrum et al are indeed not an infringement on corporate 
rights-to-free-spectrum but a reminder that the willingness of the 
public to subsidize a global telco-machine has its limits - not least 
because 'market failures' are (also) corporate failures, and the digital 
divide - if one wants to frame it in these terms at all - is also, 
perhaps even primarily (at least if one looks at the growing lit on the 
failure of public-private partnerships) a matter of corporate 
accountability.

But it is equally important, I think, to resist the kind of cheap attack 
on multilateralism that rides on the populist wave of anti-UN 
'corruption' charges and the perceived lack of accountability in 
international organizations. In its desire to link multilateralism to 
Soviet-style central planning, the Economist is more than willing to 
raise (at least implicitly) the question of accountability in relation 
to public actors, but not to private/corporate ones - and that's what 
makes their argument so weak.

So maybe this is a way to reframe some of this, not sure,

Soenke Zehle

Sasha Costanza-Chock wrote:
> I apologize for bringing this back on-list, but I think it's actually 
> the real heart of the debate over 'financial mechanisms,' as well as the 
> next phase of the Summit (and beyond).
> 
> I agree with the points you've both made. What I'm most concerned about 
> is not the statement of the underlying problem - 'digital divide' is a 
> mask for other divides, economic, literacy, gender, etc. - but the 
> cock-sure 'answer' proposed by the Economist: (surprise surprise) 
> liberalize and privatize and the market will take care of everyone.
> 
> Even the World Bank's latest report expresses the fact that the market 
> simply won't provide solutions for large segments of the population. Of 
> course, they frame it as 'market failures' rather than as inherent to 
> markets, and tend to argue that we can't really see what markets can do 
> until everything has been deregulated and privatized and opened without 
> reservation to global financial flows.
> 
> I think to me one of the most important understandings, obviously not 
> reflected in the Economist article, is that when we demand public 
> service committments from communications firms, be it in the form of 
> free access for public institutions, universities, community centers; a 
> percentage of profits for funding development and nonprofit 
> communication activity; open access to backbone; set-aside of channels 
> and spectrum for nonprofit use; or any of the other myriad mechanisms, 
> we can't let them frame it as if they are being generous by providing 
> any of these things (or as the Economist would have it, at best, being 
> foolish by 'intervening' in market allocation).
> 
> Rather, we have to ensure that everyone understands that we're not 
> begging here for a piece of the pie that someone else baked: the 
> communications industry relies on access to what should be considered 
> _public goods_ (most obviously, perhaps, spectrum and satellite orbits, 
> we can also talk about massive state investments in research and 
> infrastructure, and let's not even mention copyright and patents here). 
> Private communication firms exist and are able to make money hand over 
> fist because governments offer them huge swaths of valuable common 
> resources, and then enforce (using more public funds!) private monopoly 
> control.
> 
> We have to shift the debate so that the 'burden of proof' is not on us 
> (civil society) to justify our demands for chump change, but instead on 
> the States to meet the concrete goals of universal access (which also 
> means addressing the other barriers that lie behind it). The key is that 
> obviously, individual States can no longer make the necessary demands on 
> the private sector, because any State that tries this alone will see 
> massive capital flight and economic collapse ('discipline.') So, our 
> demands have to be made across borders to be effective. That's why we're 
> engaging in the WSIS process in the first place...
> 
> sasha